10 The Role of Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture in Food Security and Resilience Luís Kluwe Aguiar and Jane Eastham Introduction In Chapter 8, it has been suggested that urban agriculture is a potential means by which to address the issue of food security. Utilising any available space within urban areas would not only increase the land available for production but would also produce food in the locale in which is predominantly consumed. In this next chapter, the issue is examined in more depth and places a question of the extent to which the solution is realistic. The Anthropocene period, a term used to defne the epoch in which human activities have started to have an impact on the Earth’s geology and ecosys- tems, has been deemed to have begun at the start of the Industrial Revolution (Rockstrom, 2009). It is now seen to have reached a point beyond the ‘safe oper- ating space’ threshold, a term which refers to a point at which certain natural systems have become irreversibly destroyed and lost. These events have placed increasing pressure on the resilience of the food system, particularly where there is increasing competition for resources, such as land. Urban agriculture is defned as the production of crop and livestock goods within cities and towns, and has been one of the ways in which policy makers have sought to address these problems. Indeed, it is suggested that the sector is growing rapidly with some 200 million people employed within the sector, contributing food to around 800 million urban dwellers.